Worms, Fractals and Mars: Top Science Image Galleries of 2010

Earth from space, the world's oldest trees, and painfully cute baby animals were among the year's most popular image collections.

10. Crazy-Looking New Deep-Sea Creatures

July 6

More than 300 hours of diving along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge contributed 10 possible new species to the Census of Marine Life. The animals are pretty weird, but also beautiful such as the scale worm pictured above.

Three of the species, which look like colorful wavy worms, belong to a group of creatures called Enteropneust, believed to be the evolutionary link between backbone and invertebrate animals. Previously only a few specimens of the group, from the Pacific Ocean, were known to science.

9. Earth's Most Stunning Natural Fractal Patterns

September 10

The mathematical beauty of fractals is that infinite complexity is formed with relatively simple equations. By iterating or repeating fractal-generating equations many times, random outputs create beautiful patterns that are unique, yet recognizable.

In this gallery, we gathered some of the best examples of fractals in nature, including broccoli (above), lightning, peacock feathers and the Grand Canyon.

7. The '70s Photos That Made Us Want to Save Earth

March 11

Two years after Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, the new institution sent out 100 photographers to document the nation's environment writ large. Now, those photos have made it out of the root cellar of the National Archive and onto Flickr Commons, where they are getting a wider viewing than they've ever received.

6. Strange Places on Mars: What Do You Want to See Next?

January 25

Of the thousands of images NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured, we rounded up some of the weirdest and most beautiful for this gallery. The spacecraft's powerful High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera is bringing us unprecedented details of the surface of Mars, and you can have input on where the camera should focus next.

5. Photoshop of Horrors: Wired Readers Show BP How It's Done

July 28

We asked our readers to use their Photoshop skills and imagination to show BP the opportunity it missed when one of its photographers decided to doctor some press photos. If you're going to be unethical, why not do it well? And why not involve Godzilla and Kanye West?

You sent us over 100 hilarious, well-executed takes on the three photos originally altered by BP. It was tough to narrow down the field, but we posted 20 of the best in this gallery.

4. Earth as Art: Stunning New Images From Space

November 16

Earth is truly beautiful when viewed from space. But add some false color produced by satellite sensors, and it becomes hard to limit a gallery to 20 images (in fact ours has 22). These pictures, taken by the U.S. Geological Survey's Landsat 5 and Landsat 7 satellites, are so amazing that we ran them across the full width of the site. If you ever need new wallpaper for your desktop, these images are hard to beat.

3. Cutest Book Ever: ZooBorns Internet Craze Moves to Print

November 2

We were not at all surprised to see this gallery near the top of the list. Few things are more appealing and addictive than pictures of baby animals. This collection of images from the new book by the authors of the ZooBorns blog is pretty much ridiculous, as evidenced by the Edmonton Zoo's baby red pandas pictured above.

One of the greatest thing about ZooBorns, in addition to the extreme cuteness, is that it introduces us to animals we've never seen as babies, never seen before at all, or never even heard of — like a gerenuk, an aye-aye or a fossa.

2. The Oldest Trees on the Planet

March 17

This collection of the oldest known trees on the planet was more popular than we ever could have predicted. All of them are at least a couple thousand years old. But some are far older, such as the Pando colony of aspens in Utah shown above, which may be as old as a million years.

While technically not a single tree, clonal colonies like this one defy time by sending out clones, or genetically identical shoots, so that one trunk's demise doesn't spell the end for the organism. The giant colonies can have thousands of individual trunks, but share the same network of roots.

1. Satellite Photos of Haiti Before and After the Earthquake

January 14

By far our most popular gallery this year, in fact our most popular story of any sort, was a collection of satellite images of Haiti taken before and after the earthquake that struck near Port-au-Prince on January 12. These photos were released the following day by Google and the satellite-imaging company GeoEye.

Seeing the devastation from above gave us a new view of the severity of this disaster, a new appreciation for what the country was dealing with, and the daunting task that lay ahead for rescuers and relief workers.